ABIGAIL DOWD
Singer/songwriter/guitarist Abigail Dowd grew up under the longleaf pines in the Sandhills region of North Carolina. Known for her storytelling and command of an audience, she has been called "a writer of the highest caliber” (The All Scene Eye). Her soulful voice and unique classical guitar style caught the attention of Acoustic Guitar Magazine, which described the album “Not What I Seem”: “The guitar-driven introspective folk of the 1970s [as] a touchstone, but so are blues and roots rock ’n’ roll.”
Pulling from her heritage of storytelling and determination, Dowd weaves hints of Celtic melodies with the soulful gospel of the south to create a sound that dances between folk, rock and blues.
Dowd’s latest album “Beautiful Day” was released on April 23, 2021. Recorded live with a full band at the Fidelitorium, the album was produced by Grammy nominated engineer/mixer Jason Richmond.
Photo (above) by Todd Turner; Header photo by @benwillshoot
“Dowd’s eager vocals are accompanied by toe-tapping instrumentals that create a package of sonic warmth. It’s a friendly reminder that life’s blessings are happening in the here and now.”
- AMERICAN SONGWRITER MAGAZINE
Behind ‘Beautiful Day’
From The Song Catcher I Know - by Jeri Rowe
Abigail Dowd calls herself a “song catcher” rather than a songwriter.
She’ll be playing her guitar and picking out riffs, and she’ll find songs and lyrics spilling out fully formed from some creative place she really can’t explain. But she knows it comes from some place deep, some place spiritual. That, she says, is so much a part of her.
Those songs make up Abigail’s third album, “Beautiful Day.”
The album’s 12 songs touch on her childhood in North Carolina and her five years working and living in Maine. But mostly, the songs mine her present life in North Carolina. She and her husband discovered firsthand the ferocity of Mother Nature, the warmth of neighbors and the resiliency of the human spirit.
During a 13-month period, from September 2018 to October 2019, their home in Greensboro, North Carolina, was flooded six times. Two weeks before Christmas, city officials bought their house and demolished it because the floods, brought on by hurricanes and torrential rain, caused so much damage.
“It was a series of shit storms,” Abigail says.
In the beginning, after the first two floods, Abigail had to live with her in-laws for three months because the house made it hard for her to breathe. Jason moved back into their unheated house to repair and remodel it and take care for their cat, Scout, and their dog, Oscar.
Meanwhile, Abigail saw specialists at Duke Medical Center because of the pain in her chest. The water damage had affected her lungs and caused so much pain that she worried she would have to quit singing.
After Jason renovated the house, Abigail moved back in and stayed for seven months. But that summer, while touring through Georgia and Florida and attending a songwriter retreat in Colorado, the house flooded again –– worse than before.
When Abigail came home, she became a nomad.
For five months, she bounced from friend’s house to friend’s house. She didn’t know where she would be or what would happen from one day to the next. It became the most uncertain time of her life –– and the most abundant.
She found herself finger picking, memorizing lyrics, hitting record on her iPhone, and working on songs by herself in all sorts of places, at all times of the day.
She found songs while staying in her mom’s home, playing on neighbors’ front porch, sitting at a stoplight in her car and parking herself on a boulder in the middle of a creek in Colorado, a rock skip away from where she pitched her tent.
The songs came. Abigail’s “Beautiful Day” was born.
Abigail recorded “Beautiful Day” during a five-day period in late February 2020 in Fidelitorium, the acclaimed recording studio in Kernersville, North Carolina.
Run by Mitch Easter, the indie music legend who co-produced REM’s “Murmur” and fronted the North Carolina band, Let’s Active, Fidelitorium has been a go-to place for years for artists such as Wilco, Suzanne Vega and the Drive-By Truckers.
It now became the go-to place for Abigail.
Behind the board was Jason Richmond, the Grammy-nominated producer who had worked with everyone from The Avett Brothers to Branford Marsalis.
Abigail connected with Richmond after she released her second album. The two talked over coffee about working together on her next project. That next project was “Beautiful Day
Abigail’s husband, Jason Duff, her constant sideman, played bass. Richmond then brought in a stable of session musicians –– Joe MacPhail on keyboards, Austin McCall on percussion, Alex McKinney on dobro and pedal steel guitar and Scott Sawyer on electric guitar.
“I wrote these songs fearlessly when I went through a period of not knowing where I would live,” she says. “All that reaffirmed my faith. It’s that idea that even when we go through the darkest places, we can be transformed. Then, those places become magical.
“And these songs that dropped in, they remind me of those magical places. I wanted to share that.”